Pristine
by lyricsaboutcats
Summary: When the blast burned against her, Jane Shepard thought of small pictures. (Destroy ending, Mordin/Femshep.)


Shepard treads listlessly until the notes of a song capture her attention, drifting between the rougher voices of the tides.

Waves slip over her toes with each new step that she takes, feathery clouds sailing among the sky above her, and she cannot quite discern why she has wandered into such a place until she finds him again. The coastline of Sur'Kesh surrounding her reflects sunlight on starkly white beach sand and grassy flowers in the dunes bow their heads, each one weighing heavily with ceriths and beaded periwinkles.

"I thought you might be here," she calls out, smiling when he turns away from the gentle upsurge at the edge of the water. "I really missed you," she adds, very quietly.

Mordin Solus is as tall and spindling as driftwood, with an expression of surprise that softens into delight. Seashells escape from his arms and each one falls away into the sand like leaves dropping from a tree at the end of summer. Empty handed when he reaches her, he gathers her up and she laughs, holding him tightly. The smell of the coast is overwhelming on his skin, brackish with salt and refreshing.

"Shepard," he says brightly.

"I missed you," she tells him again, her voice unsteady within the embrace. "I wanted to let you know."

She looks up at him. The unspoken statement had worn through her, ultimately diffusing and echoing around her whenever the thought of him overwhelmed her during the war. She had fought with herself in the dry shadows of Tuchanka, reaching for the right thing to tell him, but everything she could think to say had poured out of her disguised as an apology.

The elevator had ascended, bright and electric.

He runs his hands through her hair and presses her forehead into his shoulder. "Aware of that," he responds, eyes closed with pleasure. "Sang a little, actually. Knew you couldn't hear it." He breathes, relaxed and a little roguish when he opens his eyes with a smile and adds: "sang to you anyway."

Shepard smiles back and tries not to cry. An intimate sensation whispers along her spine, familiar and unwanted.

Grief.

Always, grief.

Mordin holds her, twirling her in a gentle circle to distract her from her own thoughts. The water swirls higher, spraying against their calves, unexpectedly cool in the warm sunlight and he begins to guide her, leading her body with his own frame. Among the growing sound of the tide, it is a light and frivolous thing. She lets him twirl with her in the waves; their fingers brush against each other. His technical gauntlets have been lost somewhere she does not know.

"Your gloves, Mordin," she murmurs, turning back toward the sand dunes. "I'll go get them for you."

Her thoughts scatter inside her mind with a precarious disorder, and she lets go of him. The lab is sudden and sterile. There is a drawer where he keeps an extra pair and she cannot quite recall where it is.

She reaches out to find it, but her arm falters, weak and painful.

"No need, no need," Mordin tells her, and so she turns to him again. He flexes his fingers, each one colored like rust. Trepidation begins to thread through his thoughts and she can feel it spreading inside of her. She responds with soft endearment and steps back into the tide, looking up with a smile to reassure him that he has her attention. They switch positions, his body protective between her and the expanse of sand. She walks along the waves with him and waits patiently whenever he pauses to search in the rising water.

Shepard tries to remember why she is so bothered, coaxing the memory out from places that have faded, and his own impression swirls around it, faintly acquiescent. He had taken his gauntlets off one day, fingers trembling along the diminished lines of her scar as she had poured over ship reports with tired eyes. His expression had fallen into a grim frown when she smiled up at him, and then he pulled away. She escaped to see him so often and he had let her, with a small shake of his head and then the sound of quiet typing when he ran out of burnished things to say.

Once more, worn with the weight of the mission, he had reached out to her before the Omega 4 relay devoured the ship. "Arthritis, Shepard," he had admitted. "Decreased range of motion. Wear for work, unpleasant civilian tasks."

His bare fingers had been warm when he touched her, too much so for the crisp normothermia of her body, rousing her from reverie just long enough to guide her back to her cabin. An old man when he gathered her into the bed, hiding her within an excess of soft blankets, he had silently contemplated schools of Illium Skald fish while she dreamed.

Shepard recognizes it: the expanding stain of turquoise a perfect memory that is not her own.

He had watched over her.

Mordin takes a languid breath, eyes patient while he watches her in the waves, and Shepard can feel her own chest move inappreciably in response. He nods with approval. They continue to drift in the sunlight with impossibly far-reaching steps that travel through her recollection of the ship; a fracturing thought that weaves itself within the fringe of his own clearer memories of the beach.

They stop, suddenly. Waves circle her waist.

Breathing very deeply, Mordin trails a hand along the water that reaches up between them. The waves are still cold, shockingly so as they lift higher, but his voice is tender and precise. "Found you," he tells her with a smile. He presses his hand affectionately to her cheek for the last time.

There is so much water and so much light, starkly white.

 _I'll miss you._

Shepard takes a halted breath, covered by debris in the Citadel.


End file.
